Art & Exhibitions

The third edition of the biennial Desert X AlUla show is now open in Saudi Arabia. “In the Presence of Absence” draws on what the organizers say are misconceptions of the desert as an empty space where, they say, “there is much more than meets the eye.”
Consisting of 15 newly commissioned pieces, the biennial is led by independent curator Maya El Khalil and Brazilian artist Marcello Dantas, with artistic direction from curator and art advisor Raneem Farsi, and independent curator Neville Wakefield.
Ayman Yossri Daydban, A rock garden in the shape of a full-sized soccer field, Desert X AlUla 2024, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla
An open-air exhibition that is free to all, the show takes place in the desert on the Arabian Peninsula. For the first time, this edition will be sited across three locations: in the desert landscape of Wad AlFann; among the black lava stone terrain and striking views of Harrat Uwayrid; and at the AlManshiyah Plaza, which features the carefully preserved AlUla Railway Station.
Site-responsive works by Saudi and international artists appear side by side, including Monira Al Qadiri, Sara Alissa, Ayman Yossri Daydban, Kimsooja, Ibrahim Mahama, Giuseppe Penone, Faisal Samra, and Bosco Sodi, among others. 
Karola Braga, Sfumato, Desert X AlUla 2024. Photo by Lance Gerber, Courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla.
In particular, a press release for the show describes a piece by performance artist Tino Sehgal, tucked away like a bonus track on a record. Sehgal’s work, (un titled) [sic], “emphasizes the interaction between the natural elements of the desert and the human intervention through movement and sound,” the release reads, “creating a connection between the visitor, the environment, and the intangible aspects of experience and imagination.”
Artnet News’s Rebecca Anne Proctor called Desert AlUla one of the six must-see art events across the Middle East for 2023. Proctor wrote in 2022: “The seeds are being sowed in AlUla for a future art ecosystem, and the biennial can arguably be viewed as a catalyst.”
“We challenged the artists to adjust their perspective to encounter the unseen aspects of the place with reverence, attuning to the forces, rhythms and processes that shape the landscape in imperceptible ways,” El Khalil said. 
See more images from the show below.
Aseel AlYaqoub, Weird Life_ An ode to desert varnish, Desert X AlUla 2024. Photo by Lance Gerber, Courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla.
Ayman Yossri Daydban, A rock garden in the shape of a full-sized soccer field, Desert X AlUla 2024, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla.
Kimsooja, To Breathe – AlUla, Desert X AlUla 2024, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla.
Ibrahim Mahama, Dung Bara – The Rider Does Not Know the Ground Is Hot, Desert X AlUla 2024, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla.
Desert X AlUla is on view in AlUla through March 23.
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Andy Warhol once thought it would be downright glamorous to be reincarnated as “a great big ring on Liz Taylor’s finger.” It’s this fascination with fame and celebrity that drove him to create dozens upon dozens of hagiographic portraits—of musicians, cinematic stars (Taylor included), athletes, political figures—over his career. These works didn’t just take the form of his signature silkscreens, but also as his lesser-seen film portraits, a kinetic format that framed subjects in no less of an exalted light. He called them his Screen Tests.
In time for Frieze Week, Christie’s Los Angeles, in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum, will showcase a special selection of these Screen Tests. It will be a rare outing for these four-minute moving image works, the preservation and digitization of which remain an ongoing project for the museum and its Film Initiative.
“We’ve preserved about 40 percent of them and that means there are a lot more that haven’t been seen or shared,” Patrick Moore, the museum’s director, told Artnet News over the phone. “That’s what we’re trying to do at Christie’s. We want people to see some of the iconic figures, but also show them a few that they wouldn’t have been before because they’ve just been transferred.”
Andy Warhol, Lou Reed (Coke) [ST269] (1966). © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.
Between 1964 and 1966, Warhol shot upwards of 400 of these Screen Tests, which depicted people in his circle or whoever else happened into his Factory. There were his superstars like Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, and Edie Sedgwick; musicians including Bob Dylan and members of the Velvet Underground; and downtown figures ranging from poet Allen Ginsberg to writer Susan Sontag. Warhol instructed them to sit in front of his 16-millimeter camera, which captured the tiniest facial tic or movement, without sound.
“A proper painter was not supposed to be also a filmmaker in those days,” Moore explained. “The Screen Tests opened up a different kind of portraiture for Warhol. It was the beginning of an idea, which is, ‘I’m not going to be pigeonholed into any artistic medium.’”
In his lifetime, Warhol would deposit the camera originals of his Screen Tests at the Museum of Modern Art, which today works with the Andy Warhol Museum to transfer the films to high-definition digital formats. This work has enabled modern-day showcases of the Screen Tests, such as in a 2009 series of concerts, where the films were accompanied by musicians Dean & Britta’s haunting soundtrack, and in 2015, when they were splashed across Times Square billboards as part of a Midnight Moment.
Andy Warhol, Jane Holzer [ST144] (1964). © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.
The Christie’s exhibition will present eight of these portraits, including ones of Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dalí, Lou Reed, and Niki de Saint Phalle. Two new Screen Tests will go on view for the first time, featuring Holzer and Sedgwick (in color). They will be projected on a loop in Christie’s dedicated gallery space, at 14 feet in height and 16 feet in width, in a screening that the auction house’s deputy chairman, Sonya Roth, described as “immersive.”
“It ends up being this intimate portrait of the person,” she told me. “You’re really forced to look at the detail at that scale. They’ll be really engrossing.”
Both Roth and Moore were quick to highlight the role of collector Maria Bell in pushing through the exhibition. Bell, who is currently producing a documentary on Warhol, was keen to display the Screen Tests, Moore said, to spotlight the Film Initiative and “how much support the films need to be preserved and made accessible.”
Not least, that Warhol’s Screen Tests would go on view in L.A., the heart of America’s moviemaking machine, seems apropos to an artist who always looked to the stars. Moore, in a statement, called it “fitting that his films would now serve to inspire new generations of artists and filmmakers.” Warhol might even deem it glamorous.
“Andy Warhol Screen Tests” are on view at Christie’s Los Angeles, 336 N Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, California, February 27 to March 14. 
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Alreadymade, its title inspired by Duchamp’s concept of the “readymade”—wherein an ordinary object is elevated to the status of a work of art—extends beyond mere attribution, prompting questions that may arise from the very answers she seeks.
History reveals a pattern of reluctance to recognize the intellectual and creative authority of female artists and writers. Figures like Artemisia Gentileschi, Simone de Beauvoir, and Lee Krasner were overshadowed by their male counterparts in their lifetimes. Through Alreadymade, we are reminded of historical injustices, urging us to reassess the narratives we’ve been taught.
See more images from the show below.
Installation view of “Barbara Visser – Alreadymade” at Kunsthaus Zürich. 2024. Photo: © Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich. © Barbara Visser.
Installation view of “Barbara Visser – Alreadymade” at Kunsthaus Zürich. 2024. Photo: © Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich. © Barbara Visser.
Installation view of “Barbara Visser – Alreadymade” at Kunsthaus Zürich. 2024. Photo: © Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich. © Barbara Visser.
Installation view of “Barbara Visser – Alreadymade” at Kunsthaus Zürich. 2024. Photo: © Franca Candrian, Kunsthaus Zürich. © Barbara Visser.
“Barbara Visser – Alreadymade” is on view at Kunsthaus Zürich, Heimplatz, CH–8001 Zurich, February 9 through May 12. More

An elaborate installation featuring a giant dragon and a poetic tale about a half-fish, half-human creature of Cantonese origin will take over the Nordic Pavilion at the upcoming Venice Biennale. It is the first time the pavilion will feature Nordic artists of East Asian heritage.
Conceived by Lap-See Lam, a Swedish-born artist of Hong Kong Cantonese descent, The Altersea Opera explores the existential implications of displacement and belonging as a result of migration through Cantonese myth as well as Lam’s own family heritage.
Although this is the Year of the Dragon according to the Chinese zodiac, the giant dragon head and tail that will bookend the pavilion has a rich backstory beyond its astrological significance. The ornate sculptures were originally part of a 100-feet-long, three-story dragon ship. Built in Shanghai, in the 1990s it was home to a floating Chinese restaurant called Sea Palace in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was repurposed as a ghost ship at the Gröna Lund theme park after the restaurant closed.
Lam discovered the ramshackle ship at the theme park and it fueled her plans for The Altersea Opera. She also drew inspiration from the Red Boat Opera Company, a traveling Cantonese opera troupe that popularized the art form in the 19th century. The “boat” structure of the installation at the Venice Biennale will be built with bamboo scaffolding by a master of the craft who recently relocated from Hong Kong to Manchester, U.K.
At the center of Lam’s installation is a film re-imagining the journey of Lo Ting, a hybrid human-fish figure of Cantonese myth. Living between the sea and the land, Lo Ting has been regarded as a symbol of Hong Kong’s cultural identity—he is said to be one of the early inhabitants of Lantau Island, the largest outlying island in the city.
Lap-See Lam with the dragon tail by Lu Guangzheng for The Altersea Opera. Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet.
Lam’s film is based on a libretto she wrote and was shot aboard the dragon ship. It tells the tale of Lo Ting’s longing to return to a former home, Fragrant Harbor, which is the literal meaning of Hong Kong in written Chinese.
The artist’s retelling of the tale centers around an encounter between two versions of Lo Ting, one of which is from the past and the other from the future. The latter attempts to reshape the fate of his kind by steering his past self onto a different path. The two versions of Lo Ting eventually meet on the dragon ship accidentally summoned by the past Lo Ting while praying to the sea goddess of Ma-Zhou (also known as Mazu or Tin Hau, Queen of Heaven), which takes them on to a journey to Fragrant Harbor. Once they arrive there, they find it transformed beyond recognition, according to the artist.
“When I started to read about the mythologies surrounding Lo Ting in the Hong Kong context, I quickly understood that it is a figure that is being used by scholars and artists,” Lam said in a video call from her studio in Stockholm. “It has very loaded significance within the contemporary art scene.”
From Lap-See Lam’s film shoot with Bruno Hibombo in the role of Lo Ting. Textile artwork by Kholod Hawash. © Lap-See Lam. Photo: Mai Nestor/Moderna Museet.
Born in 1990, Lam grew up in the back room of her parents’ Stockholm-based Chinese restaurant, which was founded by her grandmother who emigrated from Hong Kong. Her experience as a minority in Sweden underpins much of The Altersea Opera and, more generally, resonates with the biennial’s theme of “Foreigners Everywhere.”
“My work focuses on generational loss. Although the work comes from a very specific need to explore something personal, I really want to make it universal, to have that potential to reach out [to you] no matter who you are,” the artist said. “I want to make work that also lives in this emotional space, and that can be relevant for the generations before or after me.”
This year’s Nordic pavilion exhibition, which is led by Moderna Museet in Stockholm in collaboration with the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) and the Finnish National Gallery Kiasma (Museum of Contemporary Art), also features a music score composed by the Norwegian-born composer Tze Yeung Ho, who shares the same heritage as Lam. A textile work by Kholod Hawash, an Iraq-born artist based in Espoo, Finland, will also feature in the pavilion. The project is developed in collaboration with Asrin Haidari, the curator of Swedish and Nordic art at Moderna Museet.
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A recently rediscovered masterpiece by the Baroque painter Guercino made headlines in 2022 after it overshot its $6,000 estimate to sell for a whopping $600,000 at auction in Paris. The dramatic portrayal of Moses looking up to the heavens with his palms raised will now go on public display at Waddesdon Manor in England, having been recently acquired by the Rothschild Foundation.
The specialist at Chayette and Cheval auction house, who was tasked with appraising Moses (ca. 1618–19), presumably regrets attributing the work to an anonymous follower of Guido Reni from the 17th-century Bolognese School. In the catalogue notes, it was even explained that Guercino had been considered a possible author.
The real attribution did not escape the expert eye of Old Masters dealer Fabrizio Moretti, who snapped up the sleeper hit. “We never questioned the attribution,” he said in 2023. “From 100 meters, you can tell this is an early Guercino.”
Moretti Fine Art had the painting restored, uncovering a striking luminesce beneath the aging vanish and several centuries’ worth of filth. It was exhibited at the gallery’s Paris location in September and put back on the market for a major markup of €2 million ($2.2 million).
The painting now returns to the public eye for the special exhibition “Guercino at Waddesdon: King David and the Wise Women,” where it will be joined by four more paintings by Guercino that were all painted in 1651. Spanning just over three decades, the exhibition will offer visitors a sense of how the Master’s style evolved during his lifetime.
Born Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Guercino was a highly sought-after artist who was regularly commissioned by dukes, popes, and foreign courts. He is known for his masterful use of chiaroscuro, of which Moses is a prime example.
The other paintings in the exhibition are King David, already part of the collection at Waddesdon and three sibyls: Libyan Sibyl on loan from the Royal Collection, and The Cumaean Sibyl with a Putto and The Samian Sibyl, both from London’s National Gallery.
The Rothschild Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Jacob Rothschild. On behalf of the National Trust, it manages Waddesdon Manor, a 19th-century estate that originally belonged to Ferdinand de Rothschild and is now open to the public.
“Guercino at Waddesdon: King David and the Wise Women” is on view at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, England, March 20 through October.
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At this year’s Venice Biennale, Brazil’s representatives will shine a light on their home country’s indigenous peoples, once brought to the brink of extinction by colonial rule and now fighting to reclaim what was taken from them. 
The mission starts with the name of the exhibition site, which has been rebranded from the Brazilian Pavilion to the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion—a reference to the Pataxó people’s word for the territory before it was colonized by the Portuguese. Artist and activist Glicéria Tupinambá has been tapped to take it over, but hers isn’t the only work that will be on view. Artists Olinda Tupinambá and Ziel Karapotó also have contributions planned. 
For Denilson Baniwa, Arissana Pataxó, and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana—the three curators behind the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion—a communal approach was central to the message.  
“The show brings together the Tupinambá Community and artists coming from the coastal peoples—the first to be transformed into foreigners in their own Hãhãw (ancestral territory)—in order to express a different perspective on the vast territory where more than 300 indigenous peoples live (Hãhãwpuá),” the curators said in a joint written statement.  
For them, the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion “tells a story of indigenous resistance in Brazil, the strength of the body present in the retaking of territory and adaptation to climatic emergencies.” 
Curators Denilson Baniwa, Arissana Pataxo, and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana. Photo: Cabrel. Courtesy of the São Paulo Biennial Foundation.
“Ka’a Pûera: we are walking birds” is the name of the show planned for the pavilion—and it too says a lot about how the curators are thinking of their Venice project. The key phrase, Ka’a Pûera, is a portmanteau that suggests dual allusions: first, to a type of cropland that, after being harvested, yields a wave of low-lying vegetation; and second, to a small bird that expertly camouflages itself in dense forests. 
Both images reflect the Tupinambá, who were considered extinct until 2002, when they were finally recognized by the Brazilian State. In this sense, the Tupinambá are both birds and resurgent croplands: nearly erased but never gone, powerful in their ability to blend in, more powerful when they demand not to. 
Artist Glicéria Tupinambá. Courtesy of the São Paulo Biennial Foundation.
A series of mantles—feathered capes made by the Tupinambás—are included in a pavilion installation planned by Glicéria Tupinambá, who has pushed to have the few remaining examples from the 17th-century repatriated to Brazil. One of just 11 known mantles from this period was recently returned from the National Museum of Denmark, where it had lived since 1689. The other 10 remain in European collections. 
“The garment spans time and brings the issues of colonization into the present day, while the Tupinambá and other peoples continue their anti-colonial struggles in their territories—like the Ka’a Pûera, birds that walk over resurgent forests,” the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion said. 
Glicéria Tupinambá, Manto tupinambá (Tupinambá Mantle) (2023). Courtesy of the artist.
“We are living in a moment of convergence between the past, the present, and the future, in order to find a path towards sustainable ways of life and a rethinking of human relations,” said Andrea Pinheiro, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. “The questions raised by the work of the curators and artists point to relevant paths for the arduous process ahead of us.” 
The concerns of the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion mirror those of the main exhibition at this year’s 60th Venice Biennale, organized by another Brazilian curator, Adriano Pedrosa. A sprawling presentation of 332 artists titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” his planned show is all about outsiders. The exhibition includes numerous indigenous artists—including the Brazilian collective Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin—who are, according to Pedrosa’s curatorial statement, “frequently treated as [foreigners in their] own land.” 
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The haute couture shows have just ended in Paris, following another round of men’s collection in Europe. So, while you’d be excused for feeling a little fashioned out, don’t hit pause for too long because the New York shows are less than two weeks away. As a palate cleanser, we propose a trip to the pocket-sized yet treasure-filled fashion exhibition “Fashion Forward” at B Dry Goods gallery in Brooklyn.
Tucked away on a side street in Crown Heights, B Dry Goods feels every bit the high-end curiosity shop. Objects are hung densely and stacked high, every one of them handpicked by gallerist Gabe Boyers, who’s as generous with his boisterous laughter as he is knowledgeable about the 170 items on display, which range from rare vintage mementos to contemporary finds.
Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí, telephone dial powder compact (ca. 1950s), black enamel, brass and glass, $1,500. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
I popped in a few days before the January 25 opening of “Fashion Forward” (through March 30) and we perused the weird and wonderful wares together. The first order of business was a telephone dial-shaped makeup compact from the 1950s, which the Italian avant-gardist Elsa Schiaparelli had actually come up with in the 1930s. “It’s based on a design by Dalí,” enthused Boyers, who said he found it in a Paris flea market some years ago (and it’s not the first one he’s sold). “They were just ‘funning’ around when she said, ‘Let’s make it!’”
Several paper dresses caught our eye next, one bearing an outsized face of Bob Dylan and another, produced by Campbell’s Soup, that “capitalized on the Warhol craze,” said Boyers. “They called it the Warhol ‘Souper Dress,’ and it was originally folded inside of a magazine.”
Andy Warhol, Souper Dress (ca. 1965), A-line dress made of screenprinted tissue, $4,500. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
Next came a group of items that belonged to Josephine Baker, including a feathery pink hat—similar to one she wore to the Battle of Versailles—as well as her infamous banana belt (ca. 1930). Baker herself wore all the items on display, confirmed Boyers, who acquired them from a Paris sale of deaccessioned items from France’s national public radio (ORTF). It is a stunning find, even if the cloth bananas now look like they saw their best shimmy long ago. 
There is another Josephine Baker item in another display. When Karl Lagerfeld gifted a cape he’d designed to André Leon Talley, the Vogue editor and quippy fashion juggernaut, he included a portfolio of original fashion illustrations by the French poster artist Paul Colin. Some of those images, which were published unbound in 1930, depict a young, fresh-faced Baker—whose journey from a small Missouri town to the center of the Paris beau monde was the source of immense fascination for Talley. “It’s pretty rare to find a complete set of these pictures,” said Boyers, “made extra special because of the Lagerfeld provenance.”
Trunk belonging to Marie Antoinette, oak and cyprus, studded leather and hammered metal, $200,000. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
The centerpiece of the show—literally in the center, stopping us in our tracks—is a large trunk owned by Marie Antoinette, so battered that it looked as if it had been buried under the sea for centuries. “This was used to transport Marie Antoinette’s famous gowns and finery from palace to palace,” explained Boyers. “Versailles had a trunk-maker on site, as one does.” As such, they were not “fine things” meant to be kept, like furniture, so they were typically destroyed after trips in horse-drawn carriages on unpaved roads rendered them unusable—which makes the existence of this one all the rarer. “I’m sure she had hundreds at one time, but Versailles only has three of them left,” offered Boyers, who said his sample most recently belonged to a well-known designer who probably had an inkling of what it was. After all, the trunk reads “Garde-robe de la Reine” across the top, or “Wardrobe of the Queen.” 
The asking price for the trunk is $200,000. “That’s the price we put on it based on recent rare trunk sales,” said Boyers. “There were sales happening at Christie’s of Supreme Louis Vuitton where trunks were going for $280,000, and Marie is very hot right now as the goddess of fashion.” The highest price in the show, however, goes to a collection of 119 drawings by Hubert de Givenchy, costume designs for the Bolshoi Ballet’s production of Giselle in 1997. “They were gifted to his coordinator in New York, but we can only show a handful of them as they are so delicate.” Given their fragility, this archive is selling for $250,000.
Left: David Hockney’s silk red bowtie, $8,500. Right: Sonia Delaunay fabric printing mold (ca. 1924), $6,000. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
Mixed among the bigger-ticket objects are smaller, more moderately priced pieces, too: a necktie worn by David Hockney; a Sonia Delaunay fabric printing mold (ca. 1924) containing remnants of pigment; two Nike quilts by Amy Rauner—former footwear designer at Converse—celebrating the Air Force 1 shoe; a T-shirt screenprinted by Andy Warhol with the likeness of Keith Haring (ca. 1986); a metal couture belt attributed to Paco Rabanne in 1970; a magazine photo of a model wearing an Oleg Cassini outfit with a handwritten message from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, telling the designer she wanted one (“A great wool dress—would love this”); and a bronze Roman belt buckle dating back to 100 C.E., more or less.
Patrice Yourdon’s ‘bralette’ (2022) with stainless steel screws, $3,900. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
Contemporary fashion makes an appearance, too. The most eye-popping is a “bralette” made out of thousands of metal screws by New York-based artist Patrice Yourdon, whom Boyers discovered on Instagram years ago. “That would send quite a message on a first date,” he cracked. Elsewhere, Boyers included the paper disc dresses of artist Karina Sharif, also found on Instagram. “They might be difficult to wear on a rainy day like today, but perfect for laying around on a chaise.” Then there’s the “Big Hat Energy wall,” which is how Boyers describes a cluster of paintings by local artist Paul Gagner showing an exaggeratedly long cowboy hat.
Left: Paul Gagner, Big Hat Energy (2022), $3,500. Right: Paul Gagner, The Wig Shop (2022), $3,000. Courtesy of B Dry Goods.
Part of Boyers’s job, as he sees it, is to save archives from the dustbin of history. He once got a call from a picker—the people allowed to enter forgotten storage lockers for non-payment—who had opened a locker in Chicago and “not only found a piano, but a trunk full of musical manuscripts that turned out to be incredibly rare jazz manuscripts by Charlie Parker. If that guy hadn’t been there, they would have been lost.” Boyers and his team saved the musical treasures, which ended up with a “wonderful” collector, then surfaced again after his death. Which is to say, they wound up in the collection of Charlie Watts, drummer of the Rolling Stones and one of the great jazz collectors of all time. “Not to toot my own horn,” tooted Boyers, “but about 70 percent of the things in the Charlie Watts auction at Christie’s came from me.”
“My biggest fantasy,” said Boyers, “is that people will buy these things and actually wear them.” The gallerist said he himself owns and uses two soup cups and soup spoons belonging to Anna May Wong. “It’s so much fun. There’s nothing very special about them except that they belonged to her—but it’s a vibe. And, you know, you could easily wear Paul Newman’s trench coat or Frank Zappa’s leather jacket covered in pins. You’d be wearing a piece of history.”
“Fashion Forward” at B Dry Goods, 679 Franklin Avenue, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, January 25–March 30, 2024
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For a trailblazing female artist and Art Deco star, beloved by celebrity collectors from Madonna to Barbra Streisand, Tamara de Lempicka has surprisingly not yet recieved a major retrospective in the United States. That is, until now. 
This fall, the de Young Museum in San Francisco will open the first retrospective in North America to spotlight the creative life of the Polish artist. “Tamara de Lempicka” will bring together her ultramodern masterpieces (the Centre Pompidou, for one, is loaning its entire Lempicka collection), while exploring her lesser-seen design process and the complexities of her biography. Following its run in San Francisco, the show will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in the spring of 2025.
“The primary goal is to provide a more three-dimensional understanding of Lempicka,” Furio Rinaldi, the show’s co-curator, told me over the phone. “We wanted to provide a unified portrait of this incredible artist in a more complex and layered way—and not just as a poster girl for Art Deco.” 
Tamara de Lempicka, Jeune fille dessinant (ca. 1932). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Lisa Sardegna and David Carrillo, Phoebe Cowles and Robert Girard, and Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts Endowment Fund, 2022.10. © 2023 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY.
The seed for the exhibition emerged three years ago, when the de Young Museum acquired a rare Lempicka drawing from 1932. A graphite sketch, it is a finely shaded portrait of Lempicka’s daughter Kizette that bears out the artist’s accomplished draftsmanship. For Rinaldi, it further offers a glimpse into her creative process, an aspect of that isn’t immediately apparent when viewing Lempicka’s polished, highly pictorial paintings. 
“Drawing is the way she fine-tuned the figurative aspects of her compositions,” he said. “She always started everything on paper or by drawing directly on the canvas. It is essential to understanding her linear aesthetic.” 
The show will be organized chronologically to capture the various identities that accompanied Lempicka’s evolution as a painter. On the surface are her names: when she first emerged in the Paris salons in the 1920s, the artist signed her works Łempitzky, using the male delineation of her (or really, her then-husband’s) last name. Her 1925 solo exhibition in Milan saw her switch to the moniker Lempitzka, revealing her female identity for the first time. 
In 1933, when Lempicka wed Baron Kuffner, she took on the title of Baroness Kuffner. As Rinaldi pointed out, the artist’s thicket of collected names would bewilder even her close friend Françoise Gilot, who once recollected how Lempicka would confusingly call on her as Tamara one day and as the Baroness on another.  
These were hardly Lempicka’s efforts to conceal her gender or self, but more so, reveal how she was comfortable in fluidity. She seduced and loved both men and women; she never stuck in one place for long, moving from Paris to New York City to Mexico. As she once declared: “I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe.”
Tamara de Lempicka, Saint-Moritz (1929). Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, Gift of the artist, 1976, inv. 76. 121. © 2023 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY.
Lempicka’s many facets will inform the retrospective’s various chapters. “Russian Heritage” delves into the artist’s roots, while “Mannerism to Modernism” explores how the works of Old Masters and Renaissance painters animated her style. Her name-making paintings such as Young Woman in Green (1927–30) and Portrait of Ira P. (1930) are gathered in segments dedicated to “Society Portraits” and “the New Woman,” which also draw out Lempicka’s muses. 
“Painting of female nudes has a long tradition of in art history,” Rinaldi said of Lempicka’s portraits of women. “But it rarely was depicted in such a powerful way by a woman. The paintings were done for Lempicka’s pleasure, from a woman’s point of view.” 
Finally, a section called “Tamara in America” surveys her latter-day career. Lempicka moved to the U.S. in 1939, where, after World War II, her figurative style felt out of time and taste. She would venture into still lifes and abstraction, but after a disappointing showing at Iolas Gallery in New York in 1961, she never exhibited in public again. 
Still, a century since she announced herself at the Milan show, Lempicka remains a potent figure. The de Young retrospective joins a forthcoming musical and documentary celebrating her richly layered life, just as the artist continues to hold sway at auction (her 1932 portrait of Marjorie Ferry set a record when it sold for $21.1 million in 2020) and in pop culture (Madonna’s current Celebration tour pays tribute to Lempicka throughout). It’s an enduring legacy befitting a woman who crafted herself in her own image.
“Lempicka was not the daughter of a famous artist. She was not the companion, lover, or wife of a famous artist. She never really recognized anyone as her teacher,” said Rinaldi. “She really saw herself as a work of art and her paintings are an expression of her life and her self.” 
“Tamara de Lempicka” is on view at the de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, from October 12, 2024 through February 9, 2025. 
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